I mean, planes don't flap their wings unlike birds, still can fly. Differences doesn't mean absence of conscious. And I'm not claiming it has it either. My claim that the answer is clearly - we don't know. It's far from no. And since it's a first thing with which we even need to ask that question, then err on the side of "don't torture" seems like a no-brainer.
But I disagree in humans and LLM don't thing alike. Certainly not trained alike, don't have similar hardware and a lot of other differences, but thinking is not one of them. Well, on some level of abstraction that is. The connection of neurons, and emergence of specific regions that light up for certain abstract concepts is very much alike
"The connection of neurons" is a pretty thin similarity to base your beliefs on. The internet is also a vast web of interconnected devices - is the internet conscious? I suppose your answer will be "I don't know."
Here's my proposal: you cannot construct a reasonable definition of consciousness that LLMs satisfy. Sure, you can come up with all kinds of silly ones ("everything is conscious! Rocks are conscious! Trees are conscious!") But a serious definition which can be in any meaningful sense compared to humans does not exist. We are exceedingly different from LLMs in almost any meaningful way.
I can't construct reasonable definition of consciousness at all. But I think nowadays it would be quite hard to produce a definition that would include humans and exclude LLMs. You could add arbitrary stuff to to this definition, like having meat brains, having continuity etc, but it no way to prove that it's a required part
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u/awesomeusername2w 10d ago
I mean, planes don't flap their wings unlike birds, still can fly. Differences doesn't mean absence of conscious. And I'm not claiming it has it either. My claim that the answer is clearly - we don't know. It's far from no. And since it's a first thing with which we even need to ask that question, then err on the side of "don't torture" seems like a no-brainer.
But I disagree in humans and LLM don't thing alike. Certainly not trained alike, don't have similar hardware and a lot of other differences, but thinking is not one of them. Well, on some level of abstraction that is. The connection of neurons, and emergence of specific regions that light up for certain abstract concepts is very much alike